5 Smart Ways To Plan Your Social Media Marketing

Have you created a social media plan for your business? Are you looking for a simple guide to formulating a plan for your online business? Ecommerce websites often fails in the social media marketing efforts for the same reasons that most New Year resolutions fail: they have great ideas but there is no commitment or structure needed to implement them. In most cases when the dream of immediate results goes up in smoke or the set goal end up being a little more difficult to achieve than previously thought, then the social media plan is left to fall by the wayside. Has your business’s social media presence already suffered for similar reasons? You are not alone. Only a few businesses have chosen to be active in social media and stuck with it and are now reaping the results.

For the rest of the online business community, there is a need to keep honest and that is why it’s recommended that every business looking for social media marketing success should create a social media marketing plan and in a certain format.

Below are 5 tips that will help you create a social media plan to keep your business on track, active and progressive.

1. Make a commitment

Before you even begin working on your plan, you have to make a promise. It takes businesses a long time to establish a healthy a vibrant social media presence, so do not expect your list of followers, subscribers and fans to grow within days.

Avoid the temptation to kick start your online presence by updating and posting consistently, only to fade out after losing interest, getting bored or forgetting to even log in to the social media page. To avoid getting on this dangerous slide, it is important to make a commitment. While it may seem like a silly excuse, agreeing with yourself that it could take upward of six months to build the desired presence, then making a promise to invent the energy, time and resources required no matter what, can help keep you committed and provides good mental preparation to be engaged and active when your presence starts feeling like it’s in stagnation.

2. Look for your best fit

When you first start thinking of revving up social media efforts to grow your business, conduct a survey to find out whether your business already has a fan base online. Find out if there are any YouTube videos of people using or talking about your business or products. Does your brand or any of your products get mentioned a lot on Twitter? Have customers posted reviews of your products on Yelp!?

While it is important to ensure that you have a healthy presence on giants like Facebook, ensure that you first set up shop on the platforms where you are already most visible.

3. Schedule your engagements

Once you’ve settled on the specific social media platforms your business is going to concentrate on, the next thing is to find out the ideal frequency and ways of engaging with your fans. One of the most common reasons businesses suffer social media failure is infrequent interactions with users. To increase your chances of success, ensure that your interactions remain steady.

Create posts and respond to comments. You have to give your users a chance to start a conversation with you, whenever they reach out to you.

4. Create high quality content

Your followers and fans aren’t interested in commercials, but rather conversations. They already follow or like you so they certainly don’t need to be told how good your business is. They aren’t interested in your sales numbers, but rather, they are looking for useful industry news and thought leadership.

A handy rule of the thumb is to talk about your industry and your customers for about 80 percent of the time and only dedicate 20 percent discussing your brand. This means it’s time to start thinking about starting a blog writing white papers, exploring friends, releasing case studies and creating infographics.

Make your posts frequent and consistent. Strive to provide some form of new content every two days or so. Providing links to in-depth, through article you posted will help position yourself as an authority in the industry and keep your followers and fans coming back.

5. Run promotions and contests

Promotions and contests are a great way to keep followers and fans excited and interested. More importantly, they are little known way to get your brand or business in front of a large audience. If your business is always associated with some type of giveaway or another, social media noise will slowly star building up. But this does not mean that you should always have a promotion or contest going on. Have one every two months and make sure the giveaways are something your potential customers can get excited about.

Author Bio:

Jason Smith is an online manager for Wallwritten – Best place to create your own wall decal. Jason likes blogging about online strategies that are related to SEO, Content, PPC & Lead generation.